


Only Two Middle-Aged Men in the Room

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Wonder Boys - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 21:07:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6345175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tripp recovers from losing everything, James Leer is even more lost than he was in Pittsburgh, and Crabtree is still Crabtree.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Two Middle-Aged Men in the Room

I’ve known Terry Crabtree long enough to know that he’s not a writer. By this statement, I don’t mean that anything he produces is just this side of unreadable. Actually, most people tend to find that it’s just the opposite, but of the grand total of three pieces I’ve seen him bring to completion during our long friendship, every one of them has been ripped off from some other unknown or forgotten writer.

It isn’t that he lacks the imagination or patience to complete an idea of his own. He just doesn’t seem to have any ideas. Not in any literary sense, anyway. What he does instead is exploit the one universal truth common to all writers everywhere -- that deep, almost pathological (if subconscious) need for praise and attention. All writers crave these things, and anyone who claims to write purely for the love of the language and craft is almost certainly lying. There are those -- few and far between as they are -- for whom this is true, but those are usually the sorts of people who put all of their ideas into a notebook, filled with barely-legible hand-written scrawl, and never show it to another living soul. But those people also don’t tend to call themselves writers. They don’t have that midnight disease that keeps a person awake until they finish the next sentence, the next page, the next paragraph, the next chapter.

And Crabtree, well. It was through discovering these small, universal truths that he became Crabtree. He learned early on, while we were still in college, that the best way into a writer’s pants is through his ego. He began reading the unpublished manuscripts of everyone he met -- mostly male, but occasionally female when no other alternative presented itself -- and through the right combination of praise and flattery, he would charm his way into bed.

I knew, from that very first moment on the stairs at Sara and Walter Gaskell’s home last February, that these were Terry Crabtree’s plans for James Leer.

I think what must have drawn Crabtree to James Leer, upon retrospect, is the way James has developed the ability to wander through life as though he honestly couldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of him. Of course, I know now that this simply isn’t true, but at the time, I don’t think even James knew that. But Crabtree had been completely taken in, and everyone could see it. I have to admit that I had expected him to lose interest in James right around the time I found them in bed together, James Leer freshly fucked and half-asleep, just after Officer Pupcik came knocking on my door to lead James to his certain demise.

But James wasn't sent to prison, and Crabtree didn't lose interest in the kid, a sudden flowering of feeling that I didn't know the cagey bastard was even capable of until some three months after I lost everything. After my _Wonder Boys_ had been swallowed by the Monongahela River, putting me back to square one, I once more put metaphorical pen to paper and in just under two months had the first draft of a brand new _Wonder Boys_ , the story of which had been a wildly-embellished recount of my last three days as a college professor of language and writing. I had gone out to Manhattan to discuss with Crabtree the particulars of the new version of my book, and it was while we were in a small cafe near his office with Bartizan, that the conversation had wandered onto the subject of James Leer.

“He’s a living cliche,” Crabtree told me in a tone that could have almost been mistaken for fondness, if I didn’t know Crabtree better.

“He’s a nutcase,” I said. I was more interested in my ham and cheese on rye than my former student.

Crabtree shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. I think you’re too hard on the kid.”

I looked up at Crabtree, realising that fondness was exactly what I had heard in his voice.

“He’s saved your career, then?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. That too. I was gonna go drop by his place this afternoon. You should come with.”

I could tell something was up, and I was determined not to get to the bottom of it. When Terry Crabtree was up to something, it usually spelled trouble for everyone else around him, and that everyone else was, more often than not, yours truly.

“I thought you wanted to see my novel,” I said. “Isn’t that why you asked me to come all the way out here?”

“Yeah, but you’re still tinkering, aren’t you? Tinkering away.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses, making it perfectly clear what he thought of the status of my book.

I said nothing in response, and instead pulled out from one of my coat pockets a floppy disk that I had brought with me, its contents being a single document file. Crabtree reached out and snatched the disk from my hand.

“Is this it?” he asked. “I thought you didn’t like writing on a computer.”

“It’s easier to make copies this way, in case someone decides to throw the entire thing out a car door. But that copy’s yours, so you can do whatever you want with it,” I said.

Crabtree flipped the disk over in his hands a few times before pocketing it. “Well, I’m gonna read it,” he said. “But after we stop by James’. Come on.”

Before I could protest, Crabtree had thrown enough cash onto the table to cover the check and a tip and was halfway out the door. I caught up with him out on the sidewalk where he was trying to hail a cab. Like more than half of that great city, Crabtree didn’t own a car, and hadn’t for over a decade, which I still suspect may be the reason he’s always so keen to drive mine whenever he’s in Pittsburgh.

After several failed attempts, Crabtree finally secured us a cab and slid into the back seat.

“Where have you got him stashed?” I asked as I got myself situated. “Some cheap hotel near your office?”

Crabtree smiled conspiratorially at me. “No, it’s even better than that.”

“Then where?”

Crabtree didn’t answer. He just went on smiling like the madman he is. After not very long at all, I gave up hope on him unravelling this mystery that he’d built up around James Leer and watched the city pass us by through the windows, huge buildings of steel and glass that blocked out much of the sun. Finally, just when I was beginning to suspect some form of foul play, we pulled up in front of an old brownstone building in the East Village. There was a young man, maybe a year or two older than James, sitting out on the front step in an old hooded sweatshirt and shoes that were held together by duct tape. Crabtree walked up to the kid as though he was always there. Which, as it turned out, he was. I quickly paid the cab driver and followed after Crabtree with, I have to admit, some curiosity for where he had taken me.

"He's upstairs, Mister Crabtree," the kid said as he stood up quickly.

Crabtree handed the kid a twenty. "Thank you, Sherman," he said. "I'll use my key."

Sherman pocketed the cash. "Thank _you_ , Mister Crabtree."

He sat back down on the step as Crabtree unlocked the heavy front door to the building and let himself in. I followed after him into the building, which was just as crumbling and dusty on the inside as it was on the outside.

"You pay a homeless kid to spy on James?" I asked as he scaled the steps up to the third floor.

"Don't be ridiculous. He's the door man," said Crabtree.

"He's homeless."

Even as I pointed this out, as though Crabtree had somehow managed to miss this glaring detail, I realized that it was exactly the sort of thing that happened around people like James Leer and Terry Crabtree.

"So, what's up with this dump?" I asked. "I thought you'd put him up in some hotel somewhere."

"I did," said Crabtree. "But then he found this place. Moved in right after he got his advance."

By now, we had reached James' door, to which Crabtree also had a key. He let us into the apartment, which was completely predictable in every way. It was a small studio with a single, unmade bed and a desk pushed up into a corner. The desk was covered in vraious papers, with the old manual typewriter I had seen in his parents' basement now taking up the majority of the desk space. All of this -- what little there was -- was lit by a single, bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.

"It wasn't this bad when he moved in," Crabtree said.

He nodded toward the only other door in the apartment, which was half-shut, and from behind which came the sounds of a television.

Crabtree let himself through this door as well.I followed after, entering just far enough to know that James Leer was in the bath, watching some old black and white movie on a small television propped up on the tank of the toilet.

"Oh," James said when he saw us, though he made no effort to cover himself from our eyes. "Sorry, I didn't hear Sherman buzz me."

Crabtree held up his keys. "Let myself in," he said. He was leering at the naked boy in the bath with a wolfish fascination that I'm not sure if James even noticed.

"Yeah, that's right. I gave you a key," James said. "Hey, Professor Tripp. How're you?"

"Good, James. I'm doing good." I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the tiny apartment. Crabtree had not been wrong about James turning into a living cliche. I was half surprised that he hadn't blacked out the windows with cardboard and newspaper yet.

"I'm just gonna wait out here." I pointed at the bed. "Why don't you get dressed?"

"OK, Professor Tripp."

Against my better judgement, I left the pair of them in the bathroom together and retreated to the relative safety of the creaky, tiny bed against the far wall. Very shortly after that, the bathroom door was closed all the way, sealing me off from them, or maybe them off from me. While I tried not to imagine what those two were doing to one another's bodies with me in just the next room, I gave into the temptation to sneak a peek at the pages of _The Love Parade_ that littered the desk. What I found instead was mostly more of the sort of embellished autobiographical narrative I'd seen once before in that old typewriter of his, these pages no more cheery or uplifting than before.

I don't know how long I'd been reading the pages that were on that desk before James and Crabtree finally came out of the bathroom, James wearing an old bathrobe and Crabtree wearing an obscene grin.

"Oh, you're still here?" asked Crabtree facetiously.

"Fuck off, Crabs," I said.

"I was just telling James your good news," Crabtree said.

"Were you, now?" I wasn't sure what good news he might have been talking about, and might not have cared particularly much at that moment.

"Yes," said Crabtree, drawing the word out longer than it needed to be.

James reached into his pocket and pulled out a half-smoked joint, which he looked at as though he'd had no idea it had been in there.

"Yeah. He said that you've finally finished another book," James said. "You might even be able to save the one career you have left."

I debated throttling Crabtree right there in that dingy apartment, but knew that if I murdered my editor, any chance I did have of getting _Wonder Boys_ to see print would go out like a candle.

"Did he?" I asked instead.

James lit up the joint and sat down on the bed. "Uh-huh. Do you think it'll work? I mean, it has been a while since _The Arsonist's Daughter_."

"Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?"

"James," Crabtree stepped in, sitting down next to James on the bed. "Tripp and I are going to go up to the office and then go out and celebrate his newly-rekindled career. Why don't you come with?"

James looked across the small room at his desk. "No, thank you, Terry. I still have a lot of work to do if I'm going to make Friday's deadline."

Whether that was bullshit or not, I had no idea, but I'd learned long before that the best way to handle James Leer is to just roll with nine out of ten of everything he said.

"OK," Crabtree said easily. "I guess I'll come back tomorrow, then. Let's go, Tripp."

I cast another glance in James' direction, watching for a moment as he stared at his desk.

"Go find us a cab," I said. "I gotta use the can."

Crabtree looked at me skeptically, but nodded and left anyway. I waited until the door was closed before stepping closer to James.

"Hey, James. Listen," I said, knowing that something had to be said, but not quite knowing how to go about saying it.

"What is it, Professor Tripp?" James asked, finally breaking eye contact with his desk and looking up at me.

"You're a good kid, James," I said. "And Crabtree, well. I've known him a long time."

"I know," James said. "He told me you guys went to college together."

I nodded. "We did. And as long as I've known him, he's never really been the sort of guy to keep someone around."

James took a moment to consider this. "He keeps you around."

"Yes, James, he does," I agreed. "But I'm also not sleeping with him. He likes to collect weird tricks, James. Do yourself a favour and don't be the next one."

"Oh," James said softly. "All right. Thank you, Professor Tripp."

I didn't know what else to say, so I just left, consoling myself with the knowledge that at least I hadn't left him in the dark this time. I found Crabtree outside, talking to Sherman the homeless doorman, with a cab waiting at the curb.

"Here he is!" Crabtree called out. "See you tomorrow, Sherman."

As soon as we got into the cab, the smile dropped off of Crabtree's face.

"What was that all about?" he asked.

"You're sleeping with James," I answered.

"Yeah, so?" Crabtree leaned against his door.

"So?" I asked. "So, you're nearly old enough to be the kid's father, Terry. Jesus."

"Emily was young."

"Not that young." I couldn't believe we were actually arguing this. "Crabs, he's just a kid. Do you really think that you're the sort of guy he needs? You're just confusing him."

"How do you know?" asked Crabtree defiantly. "He seems to know what he likes well enough."

I ignored the implication he was trying to distract me with, knowing that this was exactly how he worked. We continued to ignore one another until we got to Crabtree's office. He left me to pay for the cab and catch up with him again, which I did just as he was walking into the lobby at Bartizan. We made our way up to his office, where he popped the floppy disk into his computer and opened the file on it.

"Excellent," he said as he quickly scrolled through the pages of text. "Great, let's go."

"Aren't you going to read it?" I asked.

"No, I'll read it later," Crabtree said. "Come on."

"You just wanted to make sure I wasn't cheating you, you bastard," I realized aloud.

"'I'll have the whole thing to you in a month'," Crabtree said. "'By the end of June.' 'By the end of August.' 'You can get it in February'."

"Yeah, fuck off," I said. "You got it, didn't you?"

"Yeah," Crabtree said as he clapped me on the shoulder. "Now let's go celebrate. Grady Tripp has finally finished a novel. This is an event that calls for lots and lots of alcohol."

After another cab ride, during which I found myself increasingly grateful for the old Fiat I bought after Vernon Hardapple took his car back, we found ourselves in a small bar just off of Times Square. It was a ridiculous place, full of people who were too young and music that was too loud and drinks that were too expensive. It wasn't Crabtree's usual sort of hang-out, but by that point, I was too tired from everything else to care. With a Roy Rogers in hand, I joined Crabtree at a small table in the corner.

"How's his book coming?" I asked.

Crabtree nodded. "Well. Really well. He's getting the final draft into me on Friday."

"Yeah, what's this about deadlines?" I asked. "I thought you hated deadlines."

"His; not mine," Crabtree said. "Apparently, he works better under the pressure of a deadline. That's what he says, anyway."

I thought back to the story he'd written for workshop, which I'd later found out was written over the span of an hour. I'd almost put money on it that the hour spent working on that story was the hour before he left for the college.

"Yeah, I suppose he does," I agreed.

We sat in silence for a long moment, letting the bar exist around the two only middle-aged men in the building.

"So what'd you say to him?" asked Crabtree finally.

"Who?" I asked.

"James."

"Oh, James," I said. "Nothing."

"No, don't say nothing to me," Crabtree said. "What'd you say to him?"

"I didn't say anything."

Crabtree's skeptical look was back, but he said nothing.

After about another half hour, I slid my half-drank drink away from me and stood up. "I don't know about you, Crabs, but I'm beat."

"What?" he asked. "It's still early."

"Yeah, and I got up early. Now I want to go to bed. I'll see you in the morning, all right?"

I left Crabtree in that crowded bar off Times Square and began to make my way back to my hotel. At first, I tried to just walk back, but after about two minutes, I realized I had no idea where I was, and hailed another cab.

***

I was woken up early to the sound of pounding at the hotel room door.

"Tripp! Wake up!"

It was Crabtree, trying to bust down my door at seven in the morning. I considered briefly leaving him out there in the hall, but he only managed to get louder as he tried to force his way into my room, so I got up and let him in.

"What?" I asked.

"No bullshit this time," Crabtree said. "What did you say to him?"

"Say to who?" I asked. It was far too early for the Spanish Inquisition.

"James," Crabtree snapped. "What did you say to him?"

"Nothing. Why?"

Crabtree glared at me in a way that I knew meant trouble.

"What?" I asked.

"You just have to make a mess of everything, don't you?" Crabtree asked. He picked up my jeans from where I'd left them the night before and threw them at me. "Come on. He's not answering his phone."

I once again ignored that implication and dressed quickly before following Crabtree out of the hotel and down to the street. I didn't know what was going on, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know, either. As we stepped into the elevator, I automatically looked around the small space.

"What?" asked Crabtree.

"Oh, nothing," I said. "I thought for a second that I was being followed by a tuba."

" _What_?" repeated Crabtree. "You gotta get your head looked at, man."

"Yeah, probably," I agreed.

At least I wasn't being followed by that damned tuba again. At that moment, it was the only thing I cared about.

Outside James' building, Sherman was asleep on the steps, huddled under an old, ratty wool blanket. Crabtree bent over him and gave him a light slap on the cheek to wake him up.

"Sherman, buddy. Wake up," he said.

Sherman slowly roused and looked up at Crabtree tiredly.

"James isn't here," he said. "Left last night, man. First time he's gone anywhere all week."

Crabtree turned his focus back on me.

"Anything you'd like to confess, Judas?" he asked.

"I didn't say anything," I insisted. "I just told him to be careful."

"Be careful why?" asked Crabtree.

"Why?" I asked. "You've never been in a relationship that lasted longer than a month since I've known you. You're gonna fuck that kid up more than he already is."

"Should you really be giving relationship advice, Tripp?" asked Crabtree. "How many times you been divorced, now?"

"Oh, don't do this now," I said. "Come on, how do we find him?"

"Went east on St Marks," Sherman said from under his foul-smelling blanket. "About ten minutes after you guys took off."

"What's east on St Marks?" I asked.

Crabtree shrugged and shook his head. "No idea. I never come down this far, except to see James."

"Park," Sherman said.

"Of course," Crabtree said. "Come on. Thanks, Sherman."

Crabtree didn't even bother with trying to find a cab, and led the way down St Marks by foot. The park was only a few blocks away, but it was quite a lot bigger than I'd expected to find.

"Do you really think he'll be in here?" I asked, not looking forward to the prospect of combing through a park at seven-thirty in the morning.

"No," said Crabtree. "But we gotta start somewhere."

"You know, he apparently slept at a bus station in Pittsburgh sometimes," I said. "That might be complete bullshit, though. I never can tell with that kid."

"Oh, you've been giving him advice for a while, then?" asked Crabtree.

I ignored him and scanned the area to the right of the path we were walking down. So far, I didn't see anything that looked like someone sleeping rough, let alone James Leer.

"I'm pretty sure he'll go back home when he gets cold or hungry enough," I pointed out. "And how do we know he didn't come back after that Sheldon kid went to sleep?"

"Sherman," Crabtree corrected. "And that's a good idea. Go wait for him."

He threw his keys at me and kept walking.

"Now hey. Wait a minute," I said, following after Crabtree yet again.

"No, you made him run away. You wait for him to come back home," Crabtree said.

I watched him walk away for a few moments before I shook my head and turned around, not sure if I could even remember the way back to James' apartment. I didn't remember taking too many twists or turns inside the park, but at one point, we left the path and I had no idea where I was. I picked a random direction and went there, figuring that if it was wrong, I could at least circle around the edge of the park until I found the right road.

What I found instead was James Leer sleeping in the small space beneath a park bench. I'd almost walked right past him, and would have if not for the coat he was wearing, which was just as foul-smelling as it had been in Pittsburgh, if not more.

"James, what the hell are you doing?" I asked, tapping him with my toe.

He roused slowly, looking up over his shoulder at me.

"Hey, Professor Tripp," he said. "What're you doing here?"

"I could ask you the same thing, James," I said.

He crawled out from under the park bench and sat down on it. I sat down next to him, almost curious to see what logic had gone through his head this time.

"I didn't think you guys would look for me here," he said. "I was thinking about going back home, but I thought it might be too late to try to get a train, so I figured I'd wait."

"Under a park bench?" I asked.

"Yeah, why not?" said James. "It's not the first time I've slept in a park, you know. My grandparents kicked me out when I was in high school. I was homeless for about three months."

"I'm going to choose to not believe that," I told him. "Now, come on. What's this all about?"

James shrugged. "You said that Terry -- er, Crabtree... I don't have to be in New York to work my novel. I can do that from home."

"You came to New York because he lives here?" I asked.

James nodded. "Yeah. Stupid, huh?"

I sighed. "No, James. It's not stupid. Risky, maybe. But not stupid."

James pulled at the hem of his coat. "You said he doesn't care."

"No, I said to be careful," I said. "That's not the same thing. Do you know why I'm here?"

James shook his head. "No. Why?"

"Because Crabtree dragged me out of bed to come looking for you," I said.

James spent a long moment thinking about this before nodding. "Did he?" he asked.

I nodded, and as I did, spotted Crabtree off in the distance, though I don't think that he'd spotted us yet.

"Why don't you ask him yourself?" I asked.

I whistled through my fingers and waved him over. When he spotted us, Crabtree trotted across the park and sat down on James' other side.

"What the hell are you doing out here?" he asked.

James shrugged. "I don't know. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess."

Crabtree rolled his eyes. "A good idea?" he asked.

"This is what you get when you date twenty-year-olds," I said as I stood up. "Now how the fuck do I get out of this place. I'm going back to bed now that you two lovebirds are reunited."

James looked away from Crabtree long enough to glance around. "Oh, uhm. You can probably get a cab up on Avenue A. It's back that way. They don't stand there or anything, but it's where the main entrance is."

He pointed in the direction I'd come from. I left the two of them fussing over one another on that park bench, still fairly certain that neither of them knew what they were doing. I stayed in New York long enough to hear back from Crabtree over the marketability of _Wonder Boys_ before returning to Pittsburgh to Sara. I don't know how long James stayed in New York after that, but even though neither of our novels were great successes, I do know that Crabtree kept his job for another few years at least.


End file.
